The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Wesley Yang and Brittany Carney

Episode Date: May 1, 2021

Wesley Yang is a widely published essayist and narrative nonfiction writer who has written for Harper's, New York Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine and the author of the 2018 collection the Souls of Yellow Folk published by W.W. Norton and named as one of the year's best books by the New York Times and Washington Post. He is at work on a book about what he has termed the Successor Ideology and about to launch a Substack that will explore the ongoing bourgeois moral revolution that goes by that name.  Comic Brittany Carney recently made her aired standup debut on Comedy Central Stand-up Featuring. 

This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of New York's world-famous comedy cellar. Coming at you on SiriusXM 99 Raw Dog and on the Left Button Podcast Network. Dan Aderman here in the bathroom above the All the Tree Cafe. It's a long story. And, of course, Noam Dorman is here. He is the owner of the world-famous comedy cellar, which is back up and running seven nights a week, live comedy. And you never know who might stop in. We've had a couple celebrity drop-ins this week.

We have with us also Brittany Carney. She's relatively new to the Comedy Cellar. Welcome aboard. Hello. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I mean, welcome aboard the Comedy Cellar. Oh, and also for that. Thank you. Brittany Carney recently made her stand-up debut

on Comedy Central Stand-Up Featuring. Comedy Central Stand-Up Featuring? Is that the name of the show? Yeah, it's a lot of words kind of strung together, but that is the name of the show. I double-checked. Comedy Central Stand-Up Featured Pod. Anyway, her set is available on all Comedy Central digital platforms.

We have Wesley Yang, who's gonna be joining us in a bit, but for now, it's just us and Brittany. And I often like to bring in comics that are new to the Comedy Cellar on the show, just to say hello and ask them about their impressions of working at the Comedy Cellar. I'm honored, thank you for having me. This is a really interesting and cool space.

What's it like working at the Cellar? When did you start? You started before COVID or a little? Yeah, I started before COVID. It was July 2019, and it was through the channel of auditioning for This Week at the Comedy Cellar, So sort of like in conjunction with comedy central. And I had moved to New York just about six months before that.

So it was kind of a whirlwind half year. And then, yeah, I got in in July and I feel like i was just sort of uh getting not only of course at the cellar but also getting my like more uh feeling more settled into new york and new york comedy when the pandemic hit so i i saw you perform only once but okay so for people who are not for people who are not uh watching this let the record show that Brittany is an African-American woman. What age demographic would you say? I am specifically 33 years of age. 33 years of age.

But you have this kind of very interesting speech pattern and very interesting things that you talk about. So I got the feeling that you have a not run-of-the-mill background. There must be some sort of interesting background that you have. What's your background like? I grew up – so my mom is half Japanese, and I grew up mostly in Japan. My uncle in there. And then we moved around a little bit. We moved to, like, Singapore when I was, like, a kid, like, fourth, fifth grade, sixth grade. And then moved moved around a little bit. We moved to Singapore when I was a kid, like fourth, fifth grade, sixth grade.

And then we moved back to Japan. We moved back to the U.S. We moved to the U.S. when I was in the middle of ninth grade, early high school. So, yeah, that's my background. You grew up as Japanese, kind of like Steve Martin in The Jerk. He grew up a black child. You ever see that movie, the Steve Martin movie?

No, what? Is that a classic? I have not. I actually have no – Steve Martin and I – like, I revere as, like, a veteran. But I realize that I actually have a little bit of a reference for some of his, like, older stuff. So in the first scene of The Jerk, he says, I was born a poor black child. And it's him and his black family. I don't know what – like, in the first scene of The Jerk, he says, I was born a poor black child. And it's him and his black family.

I don't know what, like in the South somewhere. And that's the joke. But I picture it like, so you were born a Japanese child. So what was it like? Yeah. What was it like? Like, when did you realize that you were, you know, not like the others? Sure, sure.

Oh, yeah. How were you treated? Totally. That totally so interesting um first of all that's interesting about steve martin i'll have to check that out um i yeah i uh yeah i uh actually i feel like i'm still processing all that now um so when i i guess a few things i'll bring up is like when we came to the U.S. when I was a kid, so we would always go visit my parent family on my dad's side in Philadelphia and then as well as my mom's American side in Maryland and especially when we went to like my dad's, the church that he had grown up in and then like just the community that he had grown up but I definitely felt a bit alien because I just didn't really have that much of a strong black community where

I was growing up as a child right I had like my family and some family friends and then um so and then the inverse I think um as a kid in Japan and I think when I was really little I didn't really think about it I didn't speak English until I was four and then my parents um or rather my dad decided that I would like learn English much better if I was in an English school program in Japan and also then and still now but it's getting better there's a lot of bullying in Japan if you're mixed or whatever so um my parents switched me to an English school system in Japan and And I think that in those years, like, I had many friends who were mixed Japanese, but generally they're mixed white. So I think I, yeah, I definitely remember feeling a bit different, like, and self-conscious in terms of my hair or my skin or the fact that, like, yeah, we looked different, even though we were all kind of in a similar boat in that we were like going to an English language school in Japan, whether that was close to our family or because someone was there randomly through work. So this is super interesting. Wait, so what do your parents do? Why were they in Japan? Sure. So my mom, who grew up in Japan, she went to university in the U.S. And then where she met my dad.

And then, like, so my mom ultimately moved us around. She got... Your mom is half Japanese, you said? She is half and was born and raised in Japan. And so she's half black. Half black and half Japanese. So, yeah, my grandfather was from Southern Maryland and just stayed after World War II and like married my grandmother who,

yeah, she was a like cabaret owner. She was really glamorous when she was young and she's not passed away. But she, so anyway, that was my grandmother. And then when my mom was a teenager, they got divorced and my grandfather married another Japanese woman so when I grew up most of my life until until recently I

have uh because my grandfathers have largely passed away like I had one biological Japanese grandmother and one step Japanese grandmother and then one step much younger Japanese uh grandfather who's still alive but um anyway my mom um worked in finance she got an mba from stanford and she worked in like global finance out of japan and my dad taught english uh as a second language my father did the same thing he taught english as a second language oh really um but i i don't think I've ever heard a biography like yours in my whole entire life. Have you ever heard anything like that? Me? Oh.

I was asking Dan. No, but I mean, if you go to that American or that English speaking school in Japan, there's probably a lot of kids with interesting backgrounds that somehow wound up in Japan that are not Japanese or are not fully Japanese. Yeah. And I don't think I really thought about it until I was much older and I and you know people for example complain about like something like Facebook because you know it's just like kind of soul-sucking and people are relatively out of touch but I do in the early Facebook days what I appreciated about that kind of platform was that I actually got to reconnect

with all these people that I was like little with in Japan and then moved on all around the world and they have all really interesting lives. Are there any people in Japan or a significant community of people in Japan that are not ethnically Japanese or not 100% ethnically Japanese that are fully integrated and not American school fully? Yes. Yes. That's so interesting.

I think it's difficult. And I actually... Okay, I have a few thoughts about this. Okay, so first of all, this isn't related to me, but there is a popular celebrity from, I think, Cameroon. Forgive me.

And he's in Japan, and he speaks perfect Japanese, and he has no Japanese blood. And he has a Japanese citizenship, which is apparently very difficult to get if you're just like go there. So there's certain celebrities, for example, that like really integrate.

They like their popular late night television personalities and they just speak excellent Japanese. And they probably, you know, did a study abroad when they're in high school and then just stayed there and got a Japanese wife and all that. But they've integrated. And then I just remember definitely people in my childhood were not necessarily related to Japan by family or background, but they like, live there, K through 12, you know, and then I remember this one thing specifically, when I was a junior in college, I went back to Japan, I was studying in Hawaii for undergrad, but I went

back to Japan my junior year. And I studied at this like kind of rural university where there was, it was like, I was the only American one. And then anyway, on the weekends, I wanted excuses to run around Tokyo, which I knew. So I did this, like, I was like a stage crew member for this English language theater company. And there was a production of Oliver Twist. And there was this girl who was, like, nine and totally blonde and just, like, American family, but just spoke excellent Japanese. Like, perfect, like, definitely better than mine as someone who started thinking in English relatively early, you know. So, yeah, that's really fascinating. It's kind of an insular society.

Do you go back a lot as an adult? Yeah, totally. I've been back, the last time I was back was 2018. And then with like, with a guy I was seeing. And then I thought, okay, well, I'll go back the next year. And then that didn't happen. I was like, then I would and then I thought okay well I'll go back the next year and then that didn't happen I was like you know whatever I'll go back in 2020 and then um the pandemic hit and uh before that I had gone back the year prior and then like when I after we moved to the U.S. when I was in high school we would go back generally with my mom and my sister we'd go back to visit family, friends, and relatives.

So I don't, yeah, I think that, however, when I was back there as a junior in college, which was 20, 2008, 2009 was like a pretty intense experience because I went back really confident, like this is where I'd grown up. And, you know, I know how to speak Japanese, but I was in a kind of a rural area where I was really treated like an alien and just stared at and spoken about, like people spoke about me, like not realizing I understood them. What's the worst thing you, I have two questions.

Yeah, yeah. I got called away for just a second, so my missus. Sure. Your mother married a black man in Japan after the world, your grandmother after World War II. Yeah. That must have been a tremendous taboo at that time., your grandmother after World War II. Yeah, that must

have been a tremendous taboo at that time. It must have been relatively. And again, what's really funny is I don't think I don't know funny is the word I just realized this as an adult that I have not I did not process that as all as a young person. It was like, this is my grandfather, this is my grandmother, and then whatever. But I think in in reflection it must have been pretty difficult what i do know though is that my great-grandmother so um my mom's grandmother who she who also lived in the house you know like multi-generational household was actually in a way ahead of her time and pretty progressive about her daughter marrying this black guy from America, like in the middle of a war. I mean, after, so, so that grand,

great grandmother was really important to my mom because she always really treated my mom and her sisters, you know, not like any, like they're any different, even though they were half black. And so I never met her. She died right before I was born, but her first name is my middle name. and so the next thing i was gonna ask you is what's what's the worst conversation that you've um heard you know oh yeah people were assuming that you didn't speak oh yeah i have uh a really concrete memory this was i, this feels like I can remember really well, but it must have been 2009. I was, so I was like 20, 21. And I just got on a subway in kind of outside of Tokyo, and like a middle aged couple got on the train. And I, and what? Oh, and like, sat down next to me, like only available seats.

And then the man kind of got up and hovered around and he said to his wife, like, Oh, I don't want to sit next, like here, you know? And then the wife snapped at him and said, sit down, sit down, sit down. And I like very quietly, like I kind of quietly panicked. I didn't actually show it outwardly, but I realized that was like a pretty explicit example of just people being racist at me and thinking that I couldn't hear naturally. And so I had this book that I was reading in my bag that was in English and I

just switched it out for a book that I had from school that was in Japanese just like subtly. And then otherwise it's mostly like, I don't know, like I'll be walking around. Like for example, that year I got really close to the German exchange student. so we would walk around and then we would hear people on our campus say stuff like oh like do you like foreign girls or like do you think foreign girls are more adult like than japanese girls and most of it is like or one time it was targeted at my friend i was at a starbucks in the middle of tokyo with two people who are white and one guy was British. And he was like doing something silly. He was like pushing, um, what's that dry ice around a plate.

So it was like squeaking and we were like giggling. And then this girl in Japanese, don't Americans seem stupid. And what's hilarious in retrospect is that he's not American. He's British. And then he said in like his really, his really British sounding Japanese, like I'm not American, but yeah, there's a lot of that. When I was, sorry,

go ahead. No, we're going to introduce Wesley Yang, but just to grab that. great. Did, did the couple that spoke about you on the subway, did they actually mention your race or that you could just tell by the,

you could infer? No, I can just tell. And it's pretty classic. Like sometimes people kind of inch away from you or definitely foreign men or black men on the train in Japan. So the world's complicated.

So Dan, you have, so we want to welcome Wesley Yang. Go ahead, go ahead, Dan. We have with us Wesley Yang, a widely published essayist and narrative nonfiction writer who has written for Harper's New York Magazine and the New York Times Magazine, and the author of the 2018 collection, The Souls of Yellow Folk. He is at work on a book about what he has termed the successor ideology of the archaeological sub-stack that will explore the ongoing bourgeois moral revolution that goes by that name. Please welcome Wesley. Wesley, you switched over here on the bottom left. Wesley Yang, welcome to our podcast. How are you today? I'm okay. Thanks for having me on. Do I sound all right?

Yeah, you sound great. I probably sound good. Brittany sounds good. And Dan and Perry all sound horrible because they thought it would be a good idea to do the podcast without a mic in the bathroom. But anyway, so listen, I don't know you. I came upon you on Twitter and I sent some tweet of yours to my friend Coleman Hughes. And he and I are very good friends. And he says, oh, yeah, he's a genius. I'm like, oh. So I started following um wesley yang and about every you know week

there's something that you tweet that i just send around to a million people because um i find it you have such a unique perspective on thing things i just bring up to to speed because i don't want you to think it was some sort of like asian plot like to have the asians on this is a comedian britney carney i just met her for the first time today. And just by coincidence, she's one quarter Japanese. She has an amazing biography where her mother was half Japanese. Her father, her grandmother had married a GI in Japan after World War II. It's a pretty amazing backstory. And you wrote that book, The Soul of Yellow Folk. And I wonder if Brittany might be interested in that because that's a play on, I forget,

The Soul of Black Folk. What's the name that it was? Anyway, let's get to Wesley Yane because you're one of my heroes you are one of the people who pours cold water on wokeness day in day out is that would you say that's correct uh yeah i point out some of its uh yeah inconsistencies and uh and uh it's uh incoherency i mean would you say that's your number one issue, the thing that bothers you most in the world today? Well, I would say it's the thing I end up tweeting about the most

and then sort of theorizing about a bit, and now I owe the world a longer explanation of what's really at stake here. And so that's what I work on. You know, it's a fascinating story. And in a way, it's a story that encompasses like every aspect of American society in a way it is the American story at the moment.

And it's very hard to tell this story because we have a media that is undergoing this very process that I'm writing about. And so it has an interest in sort of not telling that story. Or it doesn't really have the ability to be reflexive about it precisely because it is held hostage, right? By those within the media who are pushing, who are advancing the ideology. So how would you explain the successor ideology for, you know, people? Well, I would say a couple things, you know, it's a kind of, you know, authoritarian utopianism

based upon a kind of radical egalitarianism that emerges from universities and sort of swept through nonprofit organizations and really toward the end of Obama's second term in office you know aided and abetted by social media which provided this pipeline through which ideas that had been percolating within sort of activist spaces and you know within you know sort of activist spaces and, you know, within, you know, sort of seeded by the universities, eventually sort of through this amazing process that involved sort of mutual growth through antagonism with the Trumpist movement that emerged in 2016 and the sort of ongoing moment that still really hasn't ended, sort of rose to obtain hegemony among a number of important institutions. And the way that I sort of put it in a sentence, it's not an easy sentence,

and yet it's the one that encompasses wokeness in all of its kind of multifarious dimensions, right? Is that wokeness is that which proceeds from the following premise, right, that American society is a matrix of oppression, right, and that the woke are those who fight this thing called white cis-heteronormative patriarchy, right? And it proceeds from the assumption that that word, that unwieldy term that I just spoke is a thing, and it's a unitary thing, and that in order to,

and that it's necessary to fight that thing at every level. And so to, and it proceeds from, there's this moment in 2018, where I wrote an essay, and I noticed, I noted the fact that there's this change in the nomenclature when people spoke of, people used to speak of racism and, and used to speak of racism and sexism. And they began to speak of whiteness and masculinity in place of those things and it's that move from saying that there's a set of attitudes or behaviors to saying that there's something intrinsic right there's something endemic to these forms of identity right that that that can't be bargained with right and that is and that inherently are forms of oppression and to the end

and that these things have to be abolished. Right. And so now we have this kind of new sort of people declare themselves to be abolitionists. Right. And when they do that, they're invoking. Those who sort of the sort of moral vanguard of the 19th century that put us on the path to ending slavery. And what's sort of intrinsic in that claim is that there is a great moral evil in our midst today, as there was in the 19th century, that must be eradicated at any cost, as that evil had to be eradicated at any cost in the 19th century. In the 19th century, it meant the bloodiest war that was fought anywhere in the world in the 19th century. And of course, there is a moral consensus among all of us, basically, who live today that that judgment was correct. There

was a great moral evil in the form of slavery, right, that had to be eradicated at any cost. And we're glad that that happens. And, you know, despite the immense suffering and destruction that was intended upon us. The question today now is that there are people who speak of the abolition of the existence of police, the existence of prisons, the existence of whiteness, the you know the existence of borders, right? And so how did we come so and we have these people that think of themselves in just the same way as the abolitionists thought of themselves in the 19th century. They thought of themselves as a moral vanguard who was expanding the realm of the

possible, right? And because there was this evil that people were asleep to, right? There's this evil in our midst that people that the status quo did not recognize, and it was their role to make the rest of society see this evil and see that we could reach a point where we had transcended it and had actually destroyed it. And they did in fact succeed in this monumental task. The question today is, does the existence of police, prisons, borders, whiteness, differential outcomes on tests, the existence of tests, the existence of, you know, sort of meritocratic measures of achievement, the existence of preferences in body morphology on dating sites, or all of these things, in fact, moral emergencies that can or must be eradicated. And because we do have a kind of professionalized activist class

who are not sort of subjected to the test of political reality, but instead speak only to a handful of cause-oriented donors who have built this enormous infrastructure to sustain them and their beliefs. And they are now a part of a kind of, they're intrinsically a part of any kind of Democratic Party coalition, not at the level of votes, but at the level of the infrastructure of those who are activists, who care about the party, who kind of run things, who have the most energy. And it's this class that I refer to as the kind of successor ideology class, right? Once you take all of these different kind of critiques of reality and you coalesce them into a kind of vision of our world as a matrix of oppression that has to be attacked at any point. And so the existence of a gender binary is a great moral evil, and therefore we must all sort of

speak our pronouns in deference to, in many cases, the non-binary person is not present, right? Like a hundred people will say they're he, him, or she, her. There is no one who is not a he, him, or she, her in a group of 100 people that are doing this. But there's this form of deference that is a way of kind of saying, I'm with you in this struggle against this unitary matrix of oppression that also encompasses whiteness, and so on and so forth. So today, something that I tweeted that I don't know if you caught, it was about like New York City public schools right now, you know, a woman posted a homework assignment for her child who's an eight-year-old. I guess that puts her in second grade and she was told to kind of

like reflect on her privilege and sort of and one of the sentences, a very memorable one, it said like, in what ways will you have to be made sort of, will you have to make, dismantle, like get rid of your privilege and your safety, right? And so it's this, it's like what's significant about this kind of ideological turn that I write about, that they're conceiving of safety, right? As a zero sum thing, right? Like in order for others to become less safe, some must be made unsafe and they must be persuaded by their second grade teachers starting young, right? To welcome as a moral obligation that relies upon them to relinquish some of their safety, right?

Well, there's so much to what you're saying. Will we lose Brittany? Brittany has a spot at your club. I have to deal with a lot of bathroom stuff in my life. I'm teaching preschool by day. I know I seem so calm and nurturing. Really, it's a thrill to be around people who can read. So recently we got tadpoles for the classroom and we were talking about

their life cycle at circle time and a kid raised a quiet hand and asked really earnestly. She said, quote, why don't the mama frogs have any boobs and I was like oh I don't need more salary I get paid in curiosity and then I just looked at my co-teacher who shrugged so we turned to the kids and I was like well frogs are amphibians and we're all mammals and then I'm without missing it be another kid raised her hand and said I'm not a mammal and this is a really progressive Brooklyn school where we don't impose any identities, so I'm just like...

Oh, that is so brave to know about yourself. Castle. Castle. Work those gills, queen. I have mixed race children. My wife is half Puerto Rican and half Indian. And my daughter, I've told the story on the podcast before, my daughter came home in the first grade.

We have a social life that has allowed her to experience uh real diversity i would say not like a contrived version diversity we have black friends asian friends you know and she never we never we never talked about these things in the house and she came home in the first grade and says daddy you're white right like like she i'm like yeah she goes do you treat people badly i'm like do i treat people badly i said'm like, do I treat people badly? I said, did you ever see daddy treat people badly? She goes, well, no, but, but I heard that white people used to treat people badly. And I, I'm like, you know, and I got so mad. I said, when the first grade, she still believes in Santa Claus and they think that she can understand something as complex as this, you know? So of course I, but I knew better than to complain

to the school, right? Because that could be the end of me. Could you imagine if I had the nerve to say something out loud about it? But, but at least my first question, I'm sure you've had the same experience. When I go one-on-one, even with people who really stand for this stuff, one-on-one, they're always X degrees more reasonable than they appear in public, which always leads me to think that there's some peer pressure here that has them all trying to outdo each other when each other are listening. Have you experienced that? Do you think there's something to that? Do they really believe it 100% the way they claim to believe it? I, you know, I mean, some of these things are very hard to believe. And, but certainly, what they don't do, and of course, this is a point that,

you know, Ibram X. Kennedy himself makes, you know, they don't debate, right? And so this idea of like debating systemic racism, you know, and I'm going to do a sub-sack about this, you know, would, it's inherently seen as a kind of, right, like an oxymoron or a paradox, you know, in terms, because it is a kind of, you know, it is a statement of faith, right? Like they will

adduce certain facts, and those facts are there. And, but it really is all a matter of like, how you, how you construe the facts, right? And so in terms of like, what they actually believe, it's kind of like, once they form Voltron, right, with, in a public setting, or when they're seeking a certain end, and what they tend to be seeking is control of institutions, right? So they're not looking to win a debate, right? And they're proceeding from the assumption that, based upon the evidence so far, is that, like, you actually don't win by a deliberative process of reason, right? You win by removing the people who have this other set of beliefs from power. And you do that by delegitimizing and turning into like violations, the things that they tend to believe.

And so there's this process back in 2015 that, you know, I first began to track all of this stuff on the microaggression thing. And, you know, so like the UC Berkeley, you know, they have this office that of whatever student life, student regulation, and they, they had a list of microaggressions, right? Things that were seen as racially hostile to say. And among those lists of microaggressions are like, America is a melting pot. You can make it if you work hard, right? And so these are statements of meritocracy and then like a previous vision of what integration would look like that was seen as normative and I

think was normative for most of us here right and then there of course you know later on there's a critique of these things and the critique may have merit or may not have merit the whole point is is that we're not going to get into a debate about it we're going to declare one set of answers to be a violation for which you can get in trouble, right? We're gonna police the other side of the existence. That happens and now, you know, we're at the point where, you know, something that I think, you know, a robust majority of the country tends to believe, if you say it immediately, like, you're just in the wrong, right? Whether and there isn't a debate that's going to go on there. Now, if you're friends with somebody and, you know, you can get them on a human level, yes, you can, you know,

you can usually ask them like, oh, there's children's book, right? The Atlantic wrote a piece about a children's book that included a page and this was a book that was given to first graders saying like here is your um here's your certificate of whiteness right and what it comes with is the uh stolen land stolen wealth right uh the ability to mess with the lives of all non-whites right and this isn't a book right that was given to first graders right and and um and how did we get to the point where and the book was like you know written about in very glowing terms by the new york times at one point how did we get to the point where we don't see that that as problematic and how do we get to the point where saying no actually like you know there's a connection between how much work you do and what rewards you're going to see is cause for being

policed and right like how did that happen and it happened because you had a group of people who had a common set of ideas who moved together through institutions and who seized certain choke points of power and who seized disciplinary power at places like UC Berkeley. And they built a cadre of people who are now sweeping through various institutions, including the Democratic Party. And they use these means. They're not here to debate you. They're here to point out the systems of oppression and privilege in which you are complicit, in which you are inherently complicit by virtue of your whiteness or your white adjacency or your multiracial whiteness. This is a new term that was coined by, there was a piece in the Washington Post after, you know, we saw this very problematic rupture in the narrative where Trump's Hispanic vote increased quite a bit, right? And increased quite a bit in very heavily Mexican border

communities, right, in Texas. And so this is like a violation of the idea that demographics are going to be destiny and determine the political fate of the country and all non-white people are going to become part of a grand coalition of people of power that would overawe and finally dismantle the white supremacy in this country. And so they had to come up with an explanation for this. And the explanation they came up with is that there's this thing called multiracial whiteness, right? And so there still are these hated enemies.

Some of them are Hispanic. Some of them are Hispanic. Some of them are Asian. They still, but they are choosing to collaborate with this thing called white supremacy rather than, you know, whatever, be good people who are a part of the future of this country. And so, you know, you create this very polarized vision of the world.

You manage to like induce a big part of the population because of like trump you know there's this man in the white house literal fascists in the white house and and and and this is what we went through and then so the whole question was like would the end of Trump in office mean that we could kind of let some of the air out of that? Maybe, maybe not, but certainly there is an attempt to keep that thing inflated as much as possible. And, um, and the attempt is going to include among other things, right? Like lying about like who is attacking Asian Americans in large

numbers. So hold that thought, hold that thought. Cause I want to talk about the Asian. So that, you know, you, this Harper's letter where they kind of complained about Trump and Harper's letter was this call for, you know, the end of cancel culture among intellectuals and stuff. But it kind of came from the assumption that this had been caused by Trump. And I think that was the fallacy certainly wasn't because I thought he was this competent man or thought he was a high-class guy or anything, or was safe with the button, but was that he stood against this politically, political correct cancel culture stuff,

and he wasn't afraid to say so. So I'm not surprised at all that now that he's gone, it's like they got nothing but daylight ahead of them. So let's start with the few, there's some things to this which are so basic and so difficult for me to process. I almost don't even mention them sometimes, but I think they need to be said.

We always learned that there was a very basic intellectual, sound intellectual premise to the civil rights movement which was it's wrong to judge people on their immutable characteristics it's wrong to have guilt by association all men are created equal it comes to christianity and the declaration of independence and all about that This movement is normalizing everything that's supposedly it's fighting. Every single thing that they are fighting, they are actually doing themselves and bragging about it, calling people Karen,

calling whiteness, you know, judging people by whiteness. That cognitive dissonance doesn't seem to cause a problem for the smartest professors in the Ivy league. What's going on there? Well, so there was this like turn, there's this intellectual turn that happened in the 1990s where they became

this discourse about whiteness and where it, you know, because the, you know, look, there was a certain amount of progress that was made and that progress should not be gainsaid. Right. Since integration and since more than a trillion dollars in social spending whose purpose was to ameliorate the condition of black America. But there is a kind of, there are persisting disparities,

right, and there are persisting things that have not gotten better. And there are communities, inner city communities, that got worse in part because many of the more functional people who were able to avail themselves of the fruits of integration all left. Black America is now mostly a more suburban community than it is an urban one, right? But like what was then left behind was a community that fell into deep social disorganization in part because it's most functional community members

who were able to leave all left. And so there is deep dysfunction, right. That, that has proven to be persistent and and there was a lot of kind of hope around what in retrospect seemed to be well-intentioned, but kind of pseudo solutions right around like testing and like Michelle Riazum and like all these attempts to like use the educational system to, to deal with problems that really sort of like predate the educational system, right? Like you have families that where there's a lot of neglect, a lot of abuse and, you know,

and all of this is connected to the poisoned legacy of slavery and segregation. There's no question about it, right? But they were problems that could not be solved by cutting people welfare checks. They were problems that could not be solved by any other means. And so within academia, right, there is this other critique, and this critique that is linked to a prior history, right? Like, you know, there were people who felt that the civil rights movement and the kind of the Civil Rights Act, that was a compromise between different factions, right? Like

there were those who wanted to do a lot less, there were those who want to do a lot more. And the politics of the next few decades was a contest between one party that wanted to do more and another party that wanted to do less, right? And all along, there was a series of compromises, but there were always those who wanted to, you know, there was always Angela Davis, right. Who is now that kind of dominant figure, right. Like not just in the, you know, American academia, which she did become by the 1990s, but like,

but also within the media itself. Right. And like how that came to happen is kind of amazing, right. Like people who believe the things that the weather underground, right? And like, how that came to happen is kind of amazing, right? Like, people who believe the things that the Weather Underground, right, and the Black Panthers, and, you know, believed in 1973, right, like those ideas suddenly became mainstream in the summer of 2020. And so there's this incredible cascade where, where sort of like the establishment was in the process of kind of like awokening, right, of sort of like the establishment was in the process of kind of like awokening right of sort of like taking on these ideas but like they didn't want to do certain things right so like like in February of 2020 right

the Princeton University they had they there was a commission to study whether or not to get rid of the Woodrow Wilson name, right. That was associated with one of their centers. And they did a study and they said, well, you know, Woodrow Wilson was a racist. He was an overt racist. He was an overt racist as president, but you know, he's an intrinsic part of the history of this institution. He was like a, you know, he was a president of Princeton before president of the United States. Like we shouldn't get rid of it. Right.

That was the official recommendation. Like, we shouldn't get rid of it, right? That was the official recommendation. The UC college system commissioned a study of their faculty of the SAT. And they said, give us a recommendation. They spent a year. They put out a 200-page document. It collated all of these findings. In fact, the SAT, you know, sort of gives a boost to, you know, poor and minority candidates.

It is not racially biased. It is predictive. It is not a useless instrument. That was their finding. And their recommendation was don't get rid of the SAT as one among several criterion. And that came in and then like, and it was like march 2020 right and then you know like a guy dies under horrible circumstances in minneapolis and a month later wilson woodrow wilson is gone the universe you know sat is gone right in in california um so there's this sudden like there's this process of kind of intellectual revolutions they happen all over time and then they happen all at once right and so in the 90s there became this discourse about like we have to talk about whiteness right and and so like arnie duncan he was the guy under obama who is responsible for the race to the top and all of these like uh you know you know

these test-based approaches to improving education and accountability and metrics and so on. He tweeted not so long ago, we have to talk less about I forget what do we have to talk less about, but we have to talk more about whiteness. Right. And so there's this movement within education schools, movements within academia where, you know, it's, it's not's not just that you know we have people that are disadvantaged by their history and there's this legacy it's also that there's this continued thing called whiteness and of course that's very problematic right because uh you know the the

seven you know i just read this article you know seven of the eight highest earning ethnicities in america right like our non-white groups right but like you know but of the eight highest earning ethnicities in america right like our non-white groups right but like you know but but these are these are recent immigrants these are privileged immigrants right there's like all this and some of them are black correct nigerians uh they're not one of the eight of the top eight but they they out earn the median white american i see and among asian amer, like for the longest time, there was this argument about like, Oh,

well, you know, it's not a real group. And, you know, there's, there's a lot of economic diversity within it. And there was this group called the Hmong,

right. Who are always like the group that were poorest and were least likely to educate, graduate high school even. But like the Hmong now make like 76,000, you know, this sort of per capita and sort of the average white person makes 65,000 per capita. So like even like the most like classically disadvantaged Asian American group has now like surpassed the white person. And so this is like at the very moment, right, like this whiteness discourse is taking over is the very

moment when all of this diversity that we let in after 1965 has flooded in, transformed the demographics of the country and transformed the economics of the country to the point where like, no, like it is it's like an actual absurdity to say that like it is white supremacy at least as measured by those metrics. There are other dimensions about like representation and who's on hollywood right like that obviously are in the in the process of drastic transformations right um but like you know there were people who um who experienced these other aspects of exclusion this is like sort of par for the course right of like integrating

go ahead dan wesley can i ask you there was a girl i went to high school with that This is like sort of par for the course, right? Of like integrating. Go ahead, Dan. Wesley, can I ask you, there was a girl I went to high school with that she's a Chinese and she's a Facebook friend of mine. And I never thought of her as anything other than an American teenager that happened to be Chinese. But now I, when, when Ali Wong came out with her show on Netflix, it was a sit.

It was a romantic comedy about two Asians. I don't know if you saw it. It's called Always Be My Maybe, I think. I did not see it, but I've seen the trailer. This girl I went to high school with was on Facebook saying, oh, finally, this is like, she was so moved and so affected

by the fact that she got to see Asians on screen in a romantic comedy. To be honest, I was completely taken by surprise. I never thought that this would have been an issue for her because I disregarded her as an American teen like any other. How big of an issue is that among Asians, Americans, Asian Americans that do not see themselves? That's kind of the main issue, right? Like, and one should not gainsay the issue because it's it's a surrogate for something else right like it's very easy to say like oh we don't see ourselves on tv and therefore you know but

like you know that is it's a kind of proxy for like other forms of like recognition that asian americans are seeking you know there are there are many sort of non-economic uh you know forms of recognition that people want in their lives. And of course, that's some of what I write about in my book. And it turns out, especially in the case of Asian Americans, that the economic, right, like advancement, like comes easier and has come easier than these other kind of like, you know, forms of recognition of recognition like and it's something also about like this kind of idea of america as a melting pot this idea of a kind of um there's a different baseline or different expectation even in canada it's kind of like oh there's like an asian diaspora right

like there's like an asian merchant class that is present here right but it it isn't fully you know it's more just a kind of combination of different cultures that live side by side with one another right rather than there being this kind of you know Hollywood this this this kind of epicenter of like you know global media right and of course we're in the process of changing that but like that that has this kind that projects inevitably this kind of like normative vision of like you know of like what the true American is and you know like Hollywood's created by Jews right but like throughout the 40s and 50s you know they they sort of idealize these images of like Cary Grant of like the ideal wasp and so on and it was like a big deal like in 1965 when

you know originally they were going to put like Robert Redford in The Graduate, right? And then they, oh, we're going to put Dustin Hoffman in, right? Like it was a big deal when they started to like represent themselves as kind of like the romantic hero and the romantic lead in a movie. And then you have the 70s or you have various kind of like white ethnic groups ceasing to be, you know, sort of merely like, you know, heavies in a mafia movie, but like romanticized or idealized. And there was that kind of like golden age of like 70s cinema.

In part, what gave that its energy was seeing figures like Dustin Hoffman and, you know, Al Pacino and so on, like, you know, graduate from being these kind of bit actors into being heroic figures. And so it's a very similar phenomenon to the Asian Americans, where we want to see ourselves as leading men. Yeah, Wesley. I'm surprised to hear Dan say that.

One of the things, I read you know, white fragility and, and I have a million horrible things to say about that book. Um, but one of the things, one of the things that she wrote about, and she, actually she writes about a number of things which are true and that, but what's really insidious about the book is that then she makes this, she, she then without, then she tries to, um, imply causation. She identifies something true and say, aha, well, it's happening at the same time as this.

It must be causing that. And that's where it really falls apart to me. But she talks about what it's like to take for granted that you're the default, that white people are the default everything. And I'm surprised, Dan, that you'd be surprised that for Asian Americans, it is something to see themselves as the male and female romantic lead in a mainstream anything. I understand that very easily.

I'm just surprised you didn't say that then. There was a point like right in like in the early, you know, 20, early 2010s, you know, you notice that like J.Crew had all these like Asian male models, right? For the first time. It's because they did their slim fit. Right. Right. And it became very popular. Right. Because like, you know, like, like slim fit, right. Is fits Asians. Right. And so like you had sizes that were sort of normed, right.

Like for beefy Americans. And, you know, there was a very interesting finding that that if you have like Asians with a BMI, like Asian men with a BMI over a certain level are perceived as more American. Right. And, and so, but like, you know, these are like the ordinary, this is kind of like the ordinary business of assimilation. Asians are 70% foreign born.

So it's still a group that like is, but they're both 70% foreign born, but that like have entered into educational systems that have like absorbed them, you know, in a single generation right in a way like like the jews were going to city college and you know brandeis for like two to three generations right like prior but but also you you look different and at a very base level like my my children cannot tell the difference between all the white groups they even though those differences might

have been very important culturally at one time in history, they're invisible to my children, but they can tell an Asian and they can tell a black person, you know? Yeah. In 1960, like the percentage of like, there's this piece of data and I have to go back and check it. You should look it up. It's in this book, White Shift shift where they talk about like in 1960 the percentage of Italians right that would like marry a non-Catholic

was like virtually none right and like by 1980 one generation of intermarriage was like totally that was just totally gone but like in 1960 it would be like a kind of moral crisis in a great many families if you were like an Irish Catholic marrying you know like a Protestant yeah or if you're an Italian marrying a Jew right and that all meant something and it now it means nothing and it meant nothing by 1990 it meant in 1990 when Seinfeld came on it was like you had like George Costanza, he's this kind of crypto Jew, right? Like he's Italian, but like, you know, he's very Jew-y and like, they're just all just white people, right?

Like they're normal, like this is the normal people and we're surrounded by these weird non-white people, right? Like the soup Nazi, the, you know, the, you know, Donna Chang or not, Donna Chang is a white woman, but like, you know, and there's this threat of like microaggression. Cause you don't really, you don't have the same set of rules as these people. There's going to be these little comic misadventures. And that was a show about microaggressions, right?

It was a show about microaggressions within the kind of upper West side, you know, class, but also like, as they confront these like non-white people who are a little bit slightly menacing, but, you know class but also like as they confront these like non-white people who are a little bit slightly menacing but you know ultimately endearing in the end because you know it's a comedy and and and we can just kind of like deal with our little conflicts through laughter right like that's the that was the ethos of 1990 it still was kind of pushing certain groups of people out onto the margins. And when you watch TV from that period, you look at Friends, you look at Seinfeld, like it's monochromatically

white, right? And actually, at that point, the city was majority non-white, right? And so I didn't experience it as oppression at that time, but certainly some people did. And as the disconnect between the racial demographics of the next generation, the baby boomers were the whitest, least foreign-born generation of American history. The baby boomers were generated, that homogeneity was generated by the fact that in 1924 right we cut off immigration from like most of the rest of the world um and for a couple of generations until like the 1960s

like america became whiter than it had ever been and then in 1965 we you know we we changed that and we opened the doors again you know to as to Asia and to Latin America. And so the widest generation of American history gave way, I mean, the Gen X is kind of an in-between generation, to the, you know, to a generation as diverse as America has ever been, right? And so like in 1915, America was diverse. America was diverse because it had Eastern Europeans, it had Southern Europeans, and these people were different. They were radically different. And, you know, they drank and therefore there was prohibition and, right?

And, you know, there was brawling and criminality and therefore there were progressive movements of kind of like wafts who wanted to like impose their Christianity and their values onto them and their behavioral norms. And then there was restrictionism, right? And you can think of it as kind of thermostatic, right? Like in 1915, the country was as, but like as diverse as it was in 2015. And so like at that moment, when people start perceiving that diversity, what happens? Like a kind of nativist turn happens this time around it does not seem that we're going to repeat what happened in 1924 okay but um we're just going to kind of blow past it um and and for the most part like it was

it was it was basically working right until you had like a group of people that had within academia who said like promulgated these ideas that like you know whiteness is to blame and we have to like turn it on to whiteness and that well like and that like you know despite the fact that like we have left behind right like overt racism of many kinds there still is this kind of covert microaggressive racism that should be and must be treated also like a moral emergency that is similar to segregation or even slavery right because like that is it's not unusual to hear you know latter-day abolitionists to kind of refer to the things that they decry in the same language so so let me because what i'm thinking here look to me although i might not agree that

um racism is as prevalent or to as as some other people might think it is to me that's not the most important issue to me the issue where it all falls apart To me, that's not the most important issue. To me, the issue where it all falls apart to me is that people think that these terrible social problems we have where, you know, only 35% of minority kids are able to read on grade level, that this is because of racism. And I don't see, and I've never seen any connection between them. We've always had oppression in this country. And to put it in, I don't mean to and I've never seen any connection between them. We've always had oppression in this country. And to put it in, I don't mean to sound flippant, but those groups that were oppressed, but their kids did their homework and went to school, they didn't stay, they had a very

bright future, even with the oppression. By the time Jews were doing well in this country, anti-Semitism was still everywhere. I mean, everywhere, you know and and Jews kind of like yeah it's true but we go on with our lives so to me. Chinese Americans exceeded the white American or the sort of the the national average income in it by like 1959 yeah and that was when you know oppression was anti-Chinese oppression was quite, you know, overt at that time. So to me, there's two things going on. In one sense, all this movement to get rid of standards and get rid of the meritocracies and all this stuff, this comes in some way, in my

opinion, from an insecurity as an incentive, just trying to sweep the problems under the rug to make it impossible to even point them out anymore because we have no tests anymore. But then the solution, I think, not a solution, but if there is a solution, it's quite simple. We have to keep children on track, I said this last week, from grades one to grade six, if a kid can be in the thick of things with his peers academically, if he has the work habits at that point, by the sixth grade, the rest of his life will be pretty good regardless of racism and all the rest of it. If he is not on track by then, you're already at the point of trying to redress the horrible effects of malnutrition in childhood. You can't fix it. And everything else we talk about is bullshit for the reason we're not talking about those first six years and how to keep these kids on track. That's a very simplistic way to look at things, right? But I think I'm

100% right. What do you think? If you get sixth grade, is it just sort of ballpark? Have you done any research? I'm just saying, if you are in the sixth grade and you're doing well in math and you can read and write well as a good sixth grader can do, you're on a pretty good path now. You're going to do well in high school. And if you can do well in high school, you're just going to do well the rest of your life. But if by sixth grade, you're reading on a second grade level, maybe if you're a talented outlier, or if you meet some remarkable, you know, and what's your name? The miracle worker, you know, there's some bright future for you. But in general, if these kids who are not able to read and write on grade level by grade six. We know their future. And then 20 years later, smart people

will say, how come we don't have more doctors and lawyers from this community? How did you think you were going to get more doctors and lawyers in this community when you were turning them out in the sixth grade when they couldn't read or write? So Wesley, what am I missing there? Well, look, there's a degree of in loco parentis that is necessary to keep people who have, you know, basically order and discipline at the most basic level in the home to compensate for that. That would be required. That just like is not consistent with, you know, with the state of schools or, you know, with what you're allowed to do. But if you had $2 trillion like Joe Biden had, would you do anything with it? So Success Academy, right? Like, you know, it's a place where people opt in, right,

to that in loco parentis, you know, and, you know, they're constantly sort of under siege, you know, by the media for the tough discipline that they impose, but they show that they're able to, you know, they're able to get these kids like, to perform, right, and to, you know, to perform on par, like with other groups who are not similarly hampered. There is, however, a self selection effect, right? And there is also, you know, one of the things they're able to do that the public schools are not able to do is they can kick out disruptive students. And so, like, one or two, you know, emotionally damaged kids can act out and ruin everybody else's experience.

And the public schools are stuck with those who don't have parents with the wherewithal to take that measure. And so like Success Academy has a basically, you know, is like deeply rooted within, you know, the New York City black community. You know, the parents, you know, there was a period early on when sort of Bill de Blasio tried to take them on and hundreds of people marched and they were almost entirely black and Hispanic, West Indian and sort of immigrant black heavily, right? And, you know, but it shows that like, and so in many cases, like they end up like kind of paring away all the problem kids, but they do succeed. Right. And they do show that like, you know, there are certain methods that we know can work, but these are not methods that are consistent with like kind of liability within schools. Right. And like,

just like the kind of norms that attain there, if you look at them, but it's our only hope. The alternative that is being tested now is we're going to, we're going to get rid of, you know, we're going to get rid of standards and we're just going to promote on the basis of race to a certain level. And we're going to, we're going to keep that up all the way into the working world and, and, and at every stage.

And so we see these movements kind of marching through not just schools, but also corporations where, you know, there is a, you know, there is a demand. And what it will create is a kind of privileged class that one cannot criticize or gainsay or even really educate, right? And there will be building resentment, but that resentment will itself be a form of racism that one is not allowed to express. So, you know, as this works itself out, if it is allowed to go unchecked, and at the moment it seems clear that the administration intends to entrench it. Wesley, can I ask you this? Isn't there another almost predictable side effect of all that, which is creating a real white identity where none has really existed except for like, you know, in the fringe KKK, you know, until now, like when you're treating white people as white.

So just so you know know like i'm sure you know the example of vermont where they're giving the vaccines to uh um uh non-whites first and you know in oakland or in some other city they're giving out cash payments to people who are non-white did you know did you know the following so there were two there were two programs for businesses like mine there was a save our stages program Trump signed. I don't know that he originated. I think Schumer might have had something to do with it. Anyway, where your eligibility was, they took your 2019 gross revenue, compared it to this year. If you lost 90% or more, you're in the first round. The Biden has a plan now for restaurants. Do you know who gets the money the first four weeks?

Non-white, non-white males go last. So it doesn't matter how much you lost. White male business owners, I'm going to put the business in my wife's name, white male business owners

go last online. There was a certain racial constitution. There was a certain detente. Isn't that illegal go ahead 70s yeah and it's it's gone and and and you know the the biden bill they're being sued now by stephen miller's uh you know he has some non-profit organization uh because they're giving money you you know, directly to black farmers, right? That like white farmers are not eligible for. So like differential government policy is supposed to meet what's called strict scrutiny, right? Like it's the highest level, you know, the government

has to show that it has a compelling interest to make policy on the basis of race and virtually anything that qualifies for review under strict scrutiny tends to fail, right? It's totally inconsistent with our legal doctrine. But as we understand, legal doctrine is the expression of elite consensus. And there is now an elite consensus that, like, it's okay to do this. And in fact, that there is, like, a moral obligation to do this. And, you know, as i was saying you know like this new elite consensus that we've coalesced around of like the equity consensus

you know as we call it is a kind of successor to you know there's like this cold war that was a bipartisan consensus there's a strong consensus that like oh we're fighting against communism for like the american way of life or whatever you want to call it and then there's this kind of like brief interregnum where there's a weak bipartisan consensus where like everybody was, there was a, there was a, there was a war on terror, right? That we, the war on terror is a con. And now there's a totally partisan consensus, right? There's a totally partisan Democrat based consensus that corporate America is

now in on right and that all of like the great and good in our society are in on those people who so like 70 yet california voted down that proposition about uh racial preferences you know yes that's true but like but in a way like that's going to be overridden by policy that is made elsewhere. Like prior to that vote, right, the University of California, San Francisco, they announced the racial demographics of their incoming class. And the racial demographics of that class, it used to be 60% Asian the year before, and that was knocked down to like less than 20%. So the percentage of Asians was cut by more than half. And then like the, you know, Hispanics and blacks,

you know, sort of was boosted, you know. And this was before the referendum saying that it's okay to use affirmative action again was even voted on. They were giving everybody a kind of sneak peek of what policy was- Are Asians going to stand for this i was going to say first of all like you know if you're if you're a white guy vermont's pretty liberal right and if you're a white guy in your 40s and you're like this isn't fair that i'm not able to get the vaccine i want to organize

politically weeks is the thing like a couple of weeks later they went to everybody but yeah but just but you know as these things proliferate, like if you're on the receiving end of one of these unfair things because of your color and you want to organize politically against this, I want to,

you know, fight. You have to, you're naturally going to start organizing as white people. This is the thing. It's terrible. But like,

they can inflict social death on you, A. B. Therefore, the only people who do it are stephen miller and so only stephen miller is doing it therefore literal fascists in the white house blah blah blah and and and so that that very that very kind of polarizing back and forth then kind of makes it impossible for anybody else to say hey hey, wait a second, this is what the law says. And this is actually like, is more fair, right? The only person who's making that argument is literal fascist in the White House. And so like that becomes fascism. And so this is how it has worked for the last four years is then this kind of like scissor movement, where like our views on free speech, our views on

due process, our views on race neutrality, right? That almost everybody assumed were a part of the consensus and that are still held by the, you know, the vast majority of Americans. Like these were like our moral intuitions are shaped to view this, see it this way, have all been disqualified and disqualified where it matters among policymakers and among those who sort of are responsible for making these decisions. So like, look, back in 1996, California was already sort of majority minority in its demographics, right?

But it was still majority white in its electorate, right? Because a lot of young people and so on. And they did these votes. They voted to outlaw race-based policy in the universities or in the government, right? They voted to outlaw affirmative action in California. But the idea was the racial demographics could change and then we could bring it back. And then in 2020, they brought it back, right? And they brought it up for a vote after the country, after California

had become, you know, like white people are like, you know, like smaller than, there are fewer white people than Hispanics, right? Like in California. And fewer white people than non-white people by a lot. So we're going to take a second bite of the apple. There's new racial demographics. It turns out, though, that Hispanics and Asians voted against Prop 16, which would have brought back affirmative action, at rates higher than the whites, right? So that these new groups groups these new non-white immigrant groups they also share the same moral

intuition that like yeah yeah like handing out government benefits on the basis of race like like that doesn't seem consistent with our idea of what democracy should be um but these things very seldom go to a vote this is one of the, right, because there was a referendum back then and there has to be another referendum now to check with the people and it turns out that like they overwhelmingly or, you know, more than 60% voted against it. There still is that kind of belief in the public, but like in most cases that doesn't matter, right? Because it's ultimately in the hands of university administrators.

It's in the hands of a handful of elites that get to design these policies. And what the public believes is just like, it's not that important. There's this overriding moral imperative that they feel that they have to pursue and that they are going to pursue. They're pursuing it. And no one is able to write about it because the or criticize i mean that's what i'm going to do on my sub stack i'm writing a post about this right now to to criticize it then put yourself in the company of stephen miller okay trump's out of office but like nothing has changed right like oh there are all these people who are like oh when trump's out of

office then like the kind of like reasonable liberals are going to be able to push back against this. And they're going to overreach and it's going to be very unpopular and people aren't going to like it. And therefore, that will provide political opportunity to push back against this movement. So overreach, because the overreach aims at the kind of, you know, free speech due process, the kind of meta discursive, you know, ability to even have a deliberative process in the first place, right? Like that overreach may actually like, you know, knock out any ability, right? Like to resist this at all, right? I got it.

Your way of conversation, hate speech, right? And like knock us off the air. And so that is the threat. And we're going to see whether it ends up being constrained or subject to reason. It might be, but it also might not be. You're way more pessimistic than even I am. I think this is quite dangerous what's going on. But I think that there's a majority in the country that is.

There's a majority. There's a super majority in the country. We'll vote for common sense. Does the super majority matter? And that's where we disagree. I actually don't think it matters that much. A reasonable Donald Trump would have easily won, you know? I mean, he would have, he would have, he had, he had to do, he had to really be horrible during COVID and have a horrible debate performance. Even with all the things he did for four years,

he probably still would have squeaked out of victory, you know, but who knows? Wait, wait, Dan, Dan, you want to bring up, you want to bring up some topics about the comedy world, Wesley's point of view. And I want to read a couple of Wesley's tweets too, but go ahead. Well, there's a couple of comedy topics that are important. First of all, Elon Musk is hosting SNL on May 8th. And some backlash against that for two reasons.

Number one, people say he's not funny and he's not a comedy person. Although they've had that before. They had Mayor Koch was a host, Wayne Gretzky hosted. I'm sure there were others that have hosted. And others just think he's just a bad guy. He's a symbol of income, of grotesque income inequality,

and it's not appropriate. So there's been some backlash against him for those two reasons. What do you think, Wesley? He's a figure within the popular culture. And he's kind of a meme and he's kind of a joke. But he's to some degree in on the joke and to some degree not in on a joke and but he's sort of he's to some degree in on the joke and to some degree not in the in on a joke and so um and so i think it makes sense right like like if you're keeping up with the you're keeping saturday night live in step with the meme social media culture and the way

it's turning right of course it's a no-brainer that you have elon musk on he you know he will clearly have no acting skill i don't know if he's going to be in any skits or anything turning right of course it's a no-brainer that you have Elon Musk on he you know he will clearly have no acting skill I don't know if he's going to be in any skits or anything but there is this kind of like awkward there is this kind of like awkward somewhat aspy affect that he has that can can be used to good comic effect if if the writers work the right way i think they can write around him you know first of all he may not be that horrible but he as an actor but he probably is but he's got a lot of personality i think he might do fine but you know they had on wayne gretzky as i said who was really bad but you know and they had on mayor Koch who's kind of a comical

figure i guess but but but i agree that i mean he's such an iconic figure that, you know, I think people are interested. And I'm interested, and I never watch SNL, and I probably won't watch this episode either, but I might. And I'm more interested in it than I would be in most episodes of SNL. I also think that... Like Bill Gates, you know, Jeff Bezos, none of them would be of any interest at all for SNL. But Elon Musk is of interest. He's a cultural icon. He was on Joe Rogan, you know, smoking pot. I mean, he's kind of a nutty guy. He's got some crazy ideas. And some people are also saying, well, because he spread misinformation about COVID. So he's a bad guy. So they shouldn't have him on.

I really can't speak to that. I guess. What did he say about COVID again? What did he say about COVID? I think he downplayed it. I think he. I'm not sure exactly. But I think.

I think he defied. Like he defied shutdown orders and kept this factory going. Oh, yeah, you're right right that's what he did uh what's the problem with this like extreme wealth though i mean everybody they have on there is like an uber celebrity well it's just instead of being a only a multi-millionaire he's a billionaire and oh okay you know and and, unlike many people in show business, his money is less based on luck, I would suggest, than your average showbiz person, who no one might disagree with this,

but especially SNL. We know many people that could probably be great on SNL. They didn't get the gig for whatever reason. I got to tell you. A signal service on behalf of the world, which is he made electric, environmentally safe vehicles cool. And that's what it had to be done.

Now that it's been done, it seems like, oh, that's just the fact like Tesla is cool. It wasn't cool, right? Like it was not framed as an desirable thing. That was almost entirely his doing. So I think it's great. I mean, if I was, it's an inspired...

That actually is as much for the environment as almost anything else in a way. Yeah. But the next question is though, Jonathan Chait referred to the people, some aspect of the global warming debate as the brain dead people.

But my thinking has always been, this is really digressing, that what's really brain dead to me is that this movement that believes that this is a existential event for civilization doesn't embrace nuclear power. If we had built nuclear power, gone all in on nuclear power 10 or 12 years ago, we'd have all Elon Musk cars being driven by electricity made from, and then we could breathe and devote our attention to renewables, you know, as the next stage, but we'd be out of this mess. But instead they're like, we have to do this immediately. And by the way, that solution that we already have, absolutely not. The hippie still holds sway somehow, right? Well, this is why I say in order to save the earth, we must first defeat the environmentalists.

You're right. Saving the earth is not about sustaining this kind of like backward looking, right? Like nature, right? Like we're going to have to like engineer the environment to some degree, right? We're going to have to, you know know scale up nuclear power to some degree it's not a silver bullet because it's so expensive and time consuming um but like but certainly it would decrease in price it's expensive now you cannot rule it out as like uh you know as uh as as an important part of it would be in the electric car world without Musk?

I mean, would we be basically where we were 15 years ago? Or would Mercedes be coming out with this gorgeous new electric car? I think he drove a cascade. I think he expanded our vision of the possible, right? And he did all of the things that like you want, you know, an entrepreneur.

He wasn't an activist, right? Like he did it through profit seeking and he made a lot of profits. But like he did more, right? Like than the combined efforts, right? Of various environmental organizations to change our baseline and to move the industry in a certain direction. And it's like when the industry starts to see profit, there is when you see transformation happening. And you have all these companies saying that we're going to only sell electric cars.

That definitely would not be where we were at, you know, were it not for him, right? Like in the year 2014. You're saying these people got some balls saying that Elon Musk shouldn't be hosting SNL because he's too rich or because he represents income inequality. You're saying these people have some chutzpah, considering half of them got to where they got, because who knows what? Wait, Dan, let's go. And then Joe Rogan said on Spotify, on his Spotify show that he wouldn't take the vaccine

if he was 21 years old. And he used an anecdote that his own kids or something had and they seemed to be fine. So what's up with that? You know, we don't want, so there was a good post by Noah Smith where he's noting the fact that our vaccine rollout ended up being totally world beating, right? Like it, it, it had a slow start.

But now we're kind of tapering off, right? We're plateauing at a level lower than we need to be in order to obtain herd immunity, right? like israel is there they got to like 70 or something like that like we're topping out at like somewhat less than 50 i think and like and it's going slower and and it became partisanized and that's really bad um and um and it it became partisanized not just because you have like black people who fear medical experimentation or kind of like white lady anti-vaxxers, right? Like that, we all anticipated that there would be these pockets of resistance. And there are those pockets of resistance. But then it became partisanized because of like freedom and because of resentment of lockdowns and of blue states and so on uh and

it's it's pretty bad like everybody should like just go get vaccinated and so like any message it's it's one of these things where like rogan is just like all he is he's a guy he's having conversation right and that's all we are like we're just like people having conversations but he's also like he's also died you know he's also walter cronkite right simply by virtue of his distribution and so he just continues to act like the guy having the conversation in his room and it's a fine conversation is it a totally fine thing for anybody to say right but like to the extent that like he's walter cronkite right like people are going to be like well

most of these viewers see him as Walter Cronkite they're just going to say see it the way that we do which is like all right that's fine that's actually true like a healthy 21 year old will probably not be endangered by getting COVID nonetheless we do want to get herd immunity and so everybody should take the vaccine absolutely but like we don't need to like freak out and be like the guy shouldn't be on the air or whatever we just have to like spread awareness that like he's just a guy who was like you know he knows a lot about fighting he was on comedy shows you know like he's not an authority on anything and so like don't treat him that way

and i don't think anyone actually not that did you notice how quickly so many reporters start alluding to the notion that perhaps he should be taken off there be censored like kind of like trying to induce corporate censorship you know reporters no i mean we have these people like like glenn greenwald has written about them and he's constantly railing about them who they are the journalistic faction on behalf of censorship and that seems like an oxymoron but like in a way it's not

it's not an oxymoron right you have like there have always been hall monitors there has always been scolds and you know people who want to dominate especially like new forms of discourse and you know present who want to dominate uh especially like new forms of discourse and you know present it as kind of like morally wrong and we're seeing continuations of that no one presented you presented an idea last week or maybe two weeks ago uh apropos of uh rogan's

comments that you know people don't want to get vaccinated, fuck them and let the vaccinated people go out and live life as they before. And the vaccinated people, the unvaccinated people can take their chances and that they should open up everything at a hundred percent. And if you're not vaccinated, then you take a risk. I mean,

do you still, do you still adhere to that? There's problems with that. I don't think I'd put that, because obviously they can spread it to various people who want to protect them from, but at some point I do.

But it's very often emerged. At some point there's a sentiment, which is like, you know what? If we're still locking down because we're worried about the health of these unvaccinated people, to the extent that that's what we're doing, I think it's fine for us to say, we've given you fair warning. We're not waiting around for you anymore. So if you get sick,

and if it goes from 600,000 deaths to 700,000 deaths, that last 100,000 deaths, actually, we're not even going to care about that because that's your choice and it's a free cut. Now, how you can implement that attitude without having innocent victims, I haven't thought that part through. We don't want innocent victims. But I do think these vaccination passports, we should be able to have a show at full capacity with people who have been vaccinated.

We should be able to have that already. I believe that very strongly. There will be innocent victims um like children you can't make it mandatory that you get vaccinated right um and we're just gonna have to muddle through but we also want to try to like you know so smith ends his piece saying like well what is this about you have all these people who have this sense of like loss of control because of lockdowns and so on and so they they're now perceiving vaccination as like not as a continuation of that loss of control and we have to like reframe it through rhetoric and whatever so that like getting the jab is resumption of control, resumption of freedom. And we have to like, we have to like get credible influencers, right. To like start seeing it that way.

And there are even ways that like you could do it antagonistically. I remember saying like, Oh, you want there to be kind of like MAGA masks, right. To make it, make it be a fuck you to wear the mask. Right. And so like maybe you know people and they probably will just do this anyway like behave in ways where it will begin to be uh an individualistic fuck you i'm taking control to get a vaccine so the only problem the only like problem i see with with what you had proposed or half seriously proposed is I think twofold is the possibility that vaccinated people can get COVID the possibility that new, new variants that are produced by all these unvaccinated people will sleep by

the vaccine. And the third problem is if there's all these unvaccinated people that are getting sick, that the hospital system is overloaded and it's just not a good thing to have. Well, no, because, because these are basically young people. I don't think they're going to overload the hospital system. But listen, we either have to get these people vaccinated or we have to get them sick. Right. We need, we need, we can't, we cannot tread water indefinitely. And I don't know how we do that. And where is Trump on this?

This is his one actual, and I had trouble accepting it, but it's his one bona fide achievement is operation warp speed. And these MAGA people are going to upend his, his, his legacy here. He should be out there every day saying, listen, don't you care about me? This is my thing, you know, put me in the history books on this. So he's been silent for some reason pretty silent he's also not allowed on twitter aren't lots of vaccines um mandatory like you can't send your kid to school if they don't have yeah they'll be mandatory for kids

yeah so why can't a vaccine be mandatory for, I don't know, to engage in society in certain ways? I have no problem with that, but I don't know. I guess we can. You know, there will also there will be a racial disparity in who is going to be locked out of stuff that is going to cause problems for some. And so, you know, and and and it, it's just terrible that it became partisanized. It became partisanized because public health officials acted in a very partisan way, right? Sort of saying like, oh, some public gatherings are really bad, but other public gatherings, you know, public gatherings, you know, are fine.

They did that and there was a loss of trust among a large segment of the population as a result. That loss of trust then creates paranoid crazies who then everybody regards as an enemy. This mutual

ping-ponging authorization process continues and, and then the, and the disease continues to incubate. And so it's all terrible. I, you know, I think we have to find messaging. How come, how come nobody ever wrote this, this science fiction movie about the plague and the final scene, the final scene is when the doctors just at the last minute come up with the antidote, nobody wants to take it. I've never heard of that. Okay, last thing, we got to go, because you guys mentioned Elon Musk. I want to confess something. Maybe Wesley has a take on this. I have never understood this wealth inequality issue. I know it's my own thickness in some way, but to me, I'm like, I don't care how wealthy

people get. As a matter of fact, if all the world's billionaires were to relocate to the United States, making wealth inequality worse, considerably worse in the United States, I think we'd be better off to have all those people here. I'm concerned about people who are struggling and not able to do well. What is this? What am I missing? Why is wealth inequality? I mean, of course, if you had a bookstore, you could sell to your neighborhood. And then you could sell mail order. And now, if you can sell to the entire planet, you're going to get tremendously wealthy.

Even if you only allow this man, Jeff Bezos, one cent profit on every item he sells, he's going to be in a multi-billionaire. So you can't stop it unless you expect him to work for free. I should mention in my book, no, in my novel, there's a scene in which you and the comics are discussing wealth inequality and you take the position that you just took, basically. Yeah. What is the, why, what, what, why do you, is it just a emotional, it just rubs us the wrong way, Wesley, what do you think? It just sticks on our cross, even that well. Well, you know,

the, there's been a kind of unmaking of the same degree of broadly shared prosperity that characterized the country of mid-century, right? And so it isn't just MAGA that looks back on that as a golden age, right? It's also, you know, it's also the liberal left, right, that sees that as the period where there is more equality in the country. And so, but like, you know, along with economic inequality comes with various forms of social inequality, right? And then there is this kind of, this constant competitive stress and pressure, right?

And a lot of that competitive stress and pressure is actually felt very acutely, you know, among the professional classes, right? Like, so people who spent years and years, you know, becoming doctors and lawyers and finance professionals and, like, credentialing themselves in certain ways. And, you know, the economies of the cities are skewed by the existence of, you know, a super wealthy class that like drives up the prices of real estate and so on. And, and, and so there, there are people who have a kind of social preeminence, but, but, but many of them in order just to keep up with the, an ever rising standard of living.

And also just like the way asset prices go up because of the existence of a mega wealthy class that like, you know, sort of all the world's rich, you know, park their money into New York real estate. It puts pressure, right, on those who are just trying to, you know, keep up a lifestyle that is commensurate to their sense of like how they should be living. Right. commensurate to their sense of like how they should be living right so it is you know a lot of it a lot of it is that and it's that class that finds itself squeezed even though they're like they might well be in the top three percent of all wage earners right like our kind of our kind of um are not able are not able to live the way like you look at like the way people live in the woody allen movie these like and then there's like an incumbent class people who are kind of

grandfathered in like to like these big upper west side apartments and so on and but like there are people who are kind of locked out from that and and so that that is the place where there is the most kind of like resentment of people who got really rich in part because they dared and were risk takers. But risk taking, it means that you also were pretty lucky. Or you just happened to coincide with a certain moment in our history. And you may not even be smarter right like then more educated people who are

better credentialed than you that that are that kind of like work as kind of like providing expert advice or like as your doctors but like make a fraction of what you do just moving money around so a lot of it has to do with like the like the move to like the financialization of the economy and then also like the rise to like mega wealth of certain people that are perceived as just kind of uh you know uh involved in a zero zero sum game game of like moving money around and raking off uh you know apart for themselves and who are you know perceived as or may in fact not really be that productive right but like are extremely rich and who drive up prices.

And like are the people that make it so that like to get into a private school that there's a population of people that can pay $60,000 a year. And then you have like these people that are locked out of it. And despite having like a sense of self-regard as like, you know, very educated, very intelligent people. And I think that's where like you see much of the intensity and then there's also like below that there is this educated precariat right and it's the educated precariat like kind of young people that have a um you know they have like a humanities degree from swarthmore and you know they're living in a place like new york city and you know maybe they get some parental subsidy but like New York City and, you know, maybe they get some parental subsidy, but like they, you know, they are, you rub up against socially, right? Like

people who have a lot of, you know, have a lot of money. And so that competitive dynamic is what drives this kind of inequality, this sense of inequality. And then of course, you know, you have this other kind of like, you get this reporting about the rest of the world where, where, where people, you know, they don't have health insurance and so on. And, and so the combination of those two things, like you're sort of your immediate social envy, you know, in concert with like a sense of conscience, right. About people who are suffering elsewhere. So let me... Inequality, you know, discourse. So let me say, I guess we're done. So there's an analogy here a little bit

to this idea of racism and that it exists and then whether or not it causes these problems that we're most concerned about. People who are not able to, like I've said many times on this show, my father started as a cab driver, was able to open a restaurant in New York City from the money he earned driving a cab. You can't really do that anymore. That is a serious problem to me. The extent that people are living with all

kinds of economic anxiety and can't get into a little bit higher strata where they don't have that same anxiety. That actually is a serious societal problem. But the fact that there's another group of people who are famously wealthy, tremendously wealthy, I don't think that's the problem at all. And I make a very good living, but I'm still way closer to the person making $30,000 than I am to Warren Buffett. Right. But, but I don't care about the equality between my lifestyle and Warren, but it's just the, it's just, we, I think I heard Tyler Cowen say this one time,

we should be really concerned with poverty. Financialization of the economy is kind of linked though, to the fact that like, you can't just. Is it? I think so. But you know what like i i'm not gonna i am not gonna be able to you know i mean if it is and i agree with you if it is and i absolutely agree with you go ahead you know there are also arguments that that it's about regulation right and and so on like they're more kind of like a libertarian approach to these things i am not going to pronounce on that i'm just going to say that like there are these social dynamics that i've just

described it has to do with like why it's very present in in our in our journalism right and in our discourse and then and then also very present in you know the concerns of the democratic party which has become this kind of like professional managerial class party that like reflects its anxieties and its desires and its interests. Even though it also, right, like is like the party very heavily reliant on, you know, votes from the underclass, right? Like it's, and so it's, it's this kind of like weird zombie concoction, inherently very unstable, and, you know, really kind of needs a villain to rally around and really got its apotheosis rally against, right? Like in Donald Trump, who sort of like offered himself in that role, ended up being this kind of, this kind of like a hyper object, right? That allowed sort of everybody that wasn't him

to distinguish themselves, right? And to stand out as like as good and noble in relation to this heel figure, right? And that's why we use the kind of like wrestling metaphor. And, you know, and of course he was very central to the maintenance of the success of the media during that period. And so everybody did very well in the weeks

after his departure, you know, sort of like ratings at CNN, you know, died by like 40%. And, you know, what, like, you know, died by like 40%. And, and so like, everybody was kind of like, depending on him to like, generate this antagonism. And then there was this like, overall, like all hands on decks to sidey wide effort to get rid of him that in a way has a kind of nobility to it, because like getting rid of him for many of these institutions also meant, right, like, torpeding their own, you know, readership and audiences, you know, and the question is, like, are they so addicted to the sort of empty calories that he generated that they're just going to, like, search around

for another kayfabe partner for Tucker Carlson or Stephen Miller to kind of like, and is that going to work? Are we going to like keep being driven by this kind of like literal white supremacy, literal fascism threat? Certainly they're trying, they're working tirelessly behind it. But like, I don't think like it's going to actually work. The question is like, what, if anything, can work? And that's what we still have to answer, because what we did with Biden is, you know, we took this kind of like superannuated figure, who's a kind of like placeholder, right? And, you know, there's going to be like an internal war for like the future of the Democratic Party that we saw presaged in the the nomination nobody liked the various images of their future which is why they defaulted to this kind of you know this kind of you know a person that you know there's not much

really left to him right but like he seems like a decent person where he can he could he could be betrayed as such in his sort of like aged feebleness and and that was a kind of just that's kind of like oh let's just like let's like default let's reset but like you know like we like the future like the the future of the party still is to be determined and the future of the country if we're gonna if we're gonna collect keep doubling down on this kind of like spectacle you know antagonism you know like a race war as entertainment um and so on like it's it could summon up some bad things uh or it could summon up you know what i'm hoping for is the emergence of a you know somewhat culturally conservative you know like hispanic politician with great uh charisma right but But like who manages to sell a picture of our future

that is consistent with like the basic moral intuitions that I was describing before and who can like put the kibosh on the, you know, put the kibosh on the successor class, right? And we'll see whether that emerges. We certainly need somebody to do that we got we got it we got to wrap it up i i wanted you to play the guitar you're not gonna have time to do that i want you to talk about i play the guitar too by the way i want and i wanted

to talk to you about the um asian hate crimes we're not going to get to to do that but uh maybe maybe you'll come on again um dan you have have the last word here, Dan Natterman. Well, no, I don't have anything to say in particular to wrap it up, but just podcast at comedyseller.com to email us your impressions, your critiques, your constructive criticism, your praise, your suggestions. Let me say the name of my sub stack.

Yes, please. Wesley Yang, my name, W-E-S-L-E-Y-Y-A-N-G, two Y's, .substat.com. And I'm going to be fleshing out in text some of the ideas I talked about today. All right. And I had wanted to really lay into Perrielle about she still insists that this cop in Columbus should have de-escalated the situation rather than shot. When the girl was about to stab the other girl and they shot, Perrielle thinks that the cop should have de-escalated. I wanted to really see if she had had time to think about how one would de-escalate a situation like that.

But we'll talk about that next week, Perry L. All right. So thank you very much, Mr. Yang. It was really an honor to meet you. I'm a huge, huge fan of your tweets. Everybody should check out his tweet, Wes Yang, at Wes Yang, W-E-S-Y-A-N-G on Twitter. Okay.

Bye, Perry L. Bye, everybody. Thanks a lot.